this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2024
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While I agree with you - who can say which workers exert the majority of effort?
By the amount of physical effort - sure, blue collar workers do the most. But this effort is also easy to find from others - everyone can do unskilled labor. So should they receive a lion's share of the company profits just because, what? They managed to get hired?
By the amount of admin, maybe it should be IT or HR or some similar department. Without them, you wouldn't be efficient. Without them you'd never be able to expand. But they don't work on the actual product, they're just there for the ride and would be doing the same thing for any other business.
Should it be sales? Engineers? Security? All these categories have the same pluses and minuses going for them.
And now let's say I start a small business. I go through the trouble of being good enough in my field to come up with a product or service that people will like. I invest my own money into this small business, and I sometimes don't get paid so I can afford to pay my suppliers. I have months where I cut electricity at home so I can keep it on in the office. I fight the beaurocracy of the state, with its million forms I have to fill in and it's million hoops I have to jump through. And this business takes off, and I finally make enough to have it be worth it. And you're telling me I should share with the others? With everyone else who hasn't put as much as me on the line, but now wants to be part of the success? Motherfucker I will cut you.
Or let's say I don't keep the company, I sell it. It goes to some conglomerate who keeps it functioning but installs a new CEO to cut costs and streamline processes. Are you telling me they paid me tens of millions of dollars for the company just so that they can share the profit with the workers? So that they can take directions from them? From the workers, who paid nothing? Who offered nothing in exchange for the rights to the business? Fuck, I'm taking you to the parking lot and breaking your kneecaps with a baseball bat, where the fuck do you even get the balls?
Or let's say I go public. I sell shares, and people buy them. A lot of people invest a lot of money into the company, and want to get their money back. You're telling me that when I turn a profit and decide to share it, I shouldn't give dividends and reward the shareholders who believed in me - instead I should reward the workers who've been getting paid all this time, who've been risk-free in this enterprise, who've been profiting whether I go up or go under? Eat shit and die.
There is no universe where workers, who are staking nothing in a company, should get rewarded over those who have a financial stake in it.
Your comment is weirdly aggressive and is entirely predicated on the idea that we can't have any economic system other than the one where the ownership class and the working class are distinct.
The whole point of workers owning the means of production is that they will take on the risk as well as the reward. The belief in that idea conjoins with the belief that it shouldn't be possible to profit from the labour of others purely because you have money to start with. It's conjunctive with the belief that the investor class is surplus to requirements.
An argument against this is, how would we maintain productivity if no wealthy people were investing in new businesses or in reviving dying ones? There are entire industries that exist only to feed into this machine. This system, that claims to be only motivated by increasing productivity to increase profits, is only putting the brakes on human advancement and betterment of our quality of life. Advertising is, by many measures, the largest industry in the world. So much talent and effort is exerted on how best to sell people a product they don't need, an art form mostly now perfected to convince us we can't live without these things, all in the name of profit.
I'm not well read enough to say that I definitely believe that the world would be better if we enforced worker co-ops. There's so many other ways things could go wrong. I do think you need to open your mind to the fact that the systems we have in place exist only due to opportunism of those who came before us.
Yeah, sorry about that. I was imagining myself in those situations and offering my own reply to the supposed request of someone different taking the credit for my own hard work, while not taking any of the risks.
I feel like enough attempts and takes have been had at workers owning the means of production, by all communist states that have existed. And since they all had the inherent flaw that they are ran and populated by humans, they all end up in corrupt enterprises where there are still just a few sitting at the top, while the masses are fighting for scraps. Arguably the best implementation of it would probably be coops, but the people managing the coop are as susceptible to corruption as any other and are also likely to end in embezzlement/power trading.
Oh, I fully agree. However, I was literally a few months away from being born in a communist state. All my life I heard stories from my parents and grandparents about the small daily injustices they lived through. I'm 100% sure capitalism benefits a handful of people and the rest are suffering - but they're not suffering more than in communism, I'll say that much. People aren't disappearing from the streets if they criticize the CEO of coca cola. They don't get found years later in a government camp, or in another communist country, or not at all. You don't need to hide your comments about the head of state in a layer of fable-like obfuscation. You don't have to worry about if the friends you're joking around with will rat you out to the government because 1/10 of the population is recruited by the secret police, and even more are collaborators. For what it's worth, you have these small liberties under capitalism. I was almost on the other side of that line, and it really annoys the shit out of me when I see people who are only arguing in favor of communism from the safety of their capitalism-created life, unaware that if the situation was the opposite and they were a capitalist in a communist country, they couldn't even dream of making their pro-capitalist thoughts public for fear of their and their family's life.
A dull knife like you won't cut anyone.